News Archive - 2003

Here are the most important news items we have published in 2003 on PHP.net.

Vancouver PHP Conference 2004

[22-Dec-2003]
The Vancouver PHP Users Association presents The PHP Vancouver Conference
on January 22-23, a professional and technical conference focused on the PHP scripting language.
The goal of this conference is to bring together some of the world's leading PHP developers and
business professionals to share their experience with both students and PHP professionals in a series of talks.

PHP Community Site Project Announced

[18-Dec-2003]
Members of the PHP community are seeking
volunteers to help develop the first Web site that is created both by
the community and for the community. The features of this project will be
driven by the needs and desires of the community as much as possible and
may include such things as blogs, news, FAQs, articles, links, and tutorials.

If you would like to contribute, please contact Chris Shiflett, who is
coordinating this project. There is a need for every type of contributor,
including developers, translators, administrators, designers, writers, and
advocates.

First PHP dedicated DVD released!

[13-Dec-2003]
The PHP Québec is pleased to announce the immediate availability
of PHP Québec DVD. Over 6 hours of conferences, recorded in
Montréal, in March 2003. DVD is subtitled in English and French,
making legendary sessions from Rasmus and Zeev available anywhere
in the world.

This DVD makes a nice christmas present for every PHP enthusiast.
Available in
English or
French.

Call for Participation: MySQL User Conference 2004

[12-Dec-2003]
The Call
for Participation for the 2004 MySQL User Conference is
now open. MySQL is looking for sessions that speak to your peers:
practical, pragmatic and clueful presentations that focus on how
you solved problems in a demanding or unique technical environment.
Additionally, the conference is looking for solid proposals for
Bird-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions and Lightning Talks.

The call for papers closes on January 14th. The call for BoFs and
lightning talks closes on February 14th. The conference will take
place on April 14th to 16th in Orlando, Florida, USA.

First Bulgarian and Second Hungarian PHP Conference

[01-Dec-2003]
The First Bulgarian
PHP conference will be held within the framework of the 2004 Web Technology
Conference in Sofia in March. The goal of the meeting is to discuss the trends and
to popularize PHP among the business, education and services sectors. The organizers
welcome proposals for sessions and company presentations.

Also coming in March 2004 is the Second Hungarian
PHP Conference building on last year's successful event. The Call For Papers is
open for the conference, speakers are welcome to hold sessions and workshops ranging
from PHP internals to web standard compliance. The event is exclusively in Hungarian.

Call for Speakers: PHP Québec 2004

[11-Nov-2003]
The PHP Québec is pleased to announce the PHP Québec
conference 2004, which will be held on March, 25th&26th 2004.
We are looking for the best speakers, willing to
share their experience and skills with the educated crowd of PHP
programmers in eastern Canada and in the USA. PHP Québec
2004 features 3 distinct tracks:

Professional PHP, dealing with php usage in professional
environment and unusual businesses.

New function list auto completion

[04-Nov-2003]
You can probably name at least one IDE providing support for PHP function name
code completion. PHP.net is just beta testing the same feature
on the search page. Try selecting the 'function
list' lookup option and start typing in a function name in the search field.
You can autocomplete the name with the space key and navigate in the dropdown
with the up and down cursor keys. We welcome feedback on this feature at
the webmasters email address, but
please submit any bugs you find in the
bug system classifying them as a "PHP.net website problem" and providing
as much information as possible (OS, Browser version, Javascript errors, etc..).

PHP 4.3.4 released!

[03-Nov-2003]
The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of
PHP 4.3.4. This release contains a fair
number of bug fixes and we recommend that all users of PHP upgrade to
this version. Full list of fixes can be found in the
ChangeLog.

PHP 5.0.0 Beta 2 released

[30-Oct-2003]PHP 5.0.0 Beta 2 has been released.
This is the first feature complete version of PHP 5, and we recommend for PHP users
to try it. PHP 5 is still not ready for production use!

Some of the more major changes include:

PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2.

XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the
excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).

SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their
website.

A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can
also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.

Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket
operations on streams.

Forum PHP in Paris, November 26 & 27th

[26-Oct-2003]
The French PHP User Group AFUP association
is proud to announce the third annual PHP meeting in Paris,
on November 26th and 27th, 2003. Developers and managers will
gather to meet Zeev Suraski and other prominent community experts
for two days of sessions, packed with
solutions and advanced techniques
(in French).

Monthly PHP Magazine in French launched!

[15-Oct-2003]Nexen.net has launched Direction|PHP,
the first PHP and MySQL dedicated magazine in French. This monthly publication
features indeep coverage of PHP industry, business and user cases and technical
articles from PHP|Architect.

ApacheCon 2003, the Global Hub for All Things Apache

[11-Oct-2003]
The official conference
of the Apache Software Foundation will be held November 16-20,
2003 in Las Vegas. More than 60 sessions highlight core and
next-generation Apache server tools, offering a wide
range of beginner, intermediate and advanced sessions.
Learn firsthand the latest developments in Apache, as
well as key open source projects, including PHP, Perl,
XML, Java, MySQL, and WebDAV.

php|cruise: The World's First Ever PHP-only Cruise

[20-Sep-2003]
The publishers of php|architect have announced php|cruise, a five-day cruise to the
Bahamas Islands featuring a lot of fun and over thirty different
sessions dedicated to PHP from well known experts like Wez Furlong, Alan
Knowles and John Coggeshall.

The cruise will take place March 1st to 5th, 2004. The organizers have
announced a contest to
give away one free place on the cruise.

PHP Usage Survey Results

[18-Sep-2003]Check out the results
of the PHP Usage Survey conducted by Zend Technologies, including feedback
from thousands of PHP users around the world. Thanks for all who contributed!

PHP Manual CHM Edition - 12th build

[06-Sep-2003]
The 12th build of the extended CHM edition is out now, and
available for download.
This build contains updated content and user notes, as well as fixes the
bugs found in the previous build. A new optional "phpZ" skin is also
introduced in this release, courtesy of Gonzalo De la Pena Andreu. For
more information, visit the
homepage of this edition.

International PHP Conference 2003 program online

[05-Sep-2003]
The organisers of the
International
PHP Conference which will take place for the third time in Frankfurt,
Germany from Nov. 2 to 5, 2003 have announced the conference program.
The conference board which consists of Bjoern Schotte, Zak
Greant, Zeev Suraski, Thies Arntzen and Jan Lehnardt has chosen more than
40 sessions for the main program on Nov. 4 and 5 and 7 in-depth
Power Workshops for the pre conference program on Nov. 2 and 3. Among the
prominent speaking crowd is Zeev Suraski, Ken Coar and many others. See
the conference
website for more information.

Server Central Donates Server

[28-Aug-2003]
Chicago-based company Server Central
has donated PHP.net a brand new server with a gigabit connection. The box is
a quad 2.4GHz machine with 2GB ram, so we're going to be using it to power
our more resource-intensive tasks, including building the manual. Thanks,
Server Central!

European Open Source Development Threatened!

[27-Aug-2003]
Today sees an international day of protest against the move by the EU to
make obtaining a patent easier within Europe. Such patents may cause Open
Source software such as PHP to infringe on existing licenses and new ones,
meaning we would no longer be safe to distribute PHP within Europe. Contact
your EU Representative to get this cruicial vote blocked. Find out more at
the campaign website

php{con west is announced

[26-Aug-2003]
php{con returns to the San Francisco Bay Area with new sessions, PHP gurus
and a whole new day of PHP-intensive learning. Their program features a full
day of tutorials, three technical session tracks over two days, an all day
coding marathon, Code Sprint, social events, works in progress, and
presentations from PHP luminaries. Early Bird discounts end on September
26th. See the full program and register online at
their website

PHP 4.3.3 released!

[25-Aug-2003]
The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of
PHP 4.3.3. This release contains a large
number of bug fixes and we strongly recommend that all
users of PHP upgrade to this version. Full list of fixes can be found in
the ChangeLog.

Active Awards 2003 Winners

[15-Aug-2003]
The Active Awards
are held annually to honor members of the open source community who actively
contribute to open source languages and display excellence in their programming
efforts. Programmers' Choice Award winners were nominated and chosen by the open
source community. Activators' Choice Award winners were chosen by ActiveState's
development team.

This year's nominees were: Monte Ohrt, Paul S. Owen, Stanislav Malyshev,
Stig Bakken and Wez Furlong. The Programmers' Choice winner is
Stig Bakken, the father of PEAR. The Activators' Choice
winner is Ilia Alshanetsky, member of the PHP Quality
Assurance team, developer of the fudforum package, and a major contributor
to PHP development.

PHP.net news history

[15-Aug-2003]
Ever wonder what was the original PHP 3.0 release announcement, what
where the choices when the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor name was
choosen, or since when you can use URL shortcuts to access pieces
of our site? We have digged up some of the most interesting news
items published on PHP.net since January 1998, when the site started
to serve its visitors. You can find these in
the news archives. There is also some historical information in
the manual's history appendix.

Select mirror for redirection

[13-Aug-2003]
The www.php.net site tries to do the best to choose close mirrors based
on all available data when redirecting users to mirror sites. Sometimes
close mirror sites are unfortunately not the fastest. This is why we have
added the mirror site selection possibility to our My
PHP.net service, which enables users to select a specific mirror
site for redirections.

PHP Magazine web site now with daily news

[12-Aug-2003]The International PHP Magazine web site
now offers daily news for PHP professionals and beginners from all over the
world, helping them to stay up-to-date with the latest news on PHP and
related technologies.

URL Shortcuts and Site Search

[29-Jul-2003]
After many of our users requested a change in how
our URL shortcuts behave when someone mistypes
a shortcut, the default behaviour now is to look for a function name
instead of performing a documentation search on Google. Those, who were
satisfied with the Google search, can set their
preference at the My PHP.net page. We are working on a better
onsite search solution, Google is used temporarily to search our site.

php|architect now in print

[17-Jul-2003]
The publishers of php|architect, a
monthly magazine dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP, have announced the
availability of a print edition of
their publication. Subscriptions are now available at a special introductory
price for readers worldwide.

PHP @ LinuxTag

[06-Jul-2003]
From July, 10th to 13th 2003
LinuxTag, Europe's
largest Fair and Congress dedicated to Open Source in general and Linux in
particular, takes place in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Under the motto "PHP and Friends" the PHP Project showcases PHP and related
projects, like MySQL, SQLite, Midgard, osCommerce or DB Designer, at booth
F21. In addition to the booth "PHP and Friends" offer an interesting
programme of
technical
talks and workshops which are held by 24 speakers from 11 nations and cover
the latest trends and technologies related to PHP, Apache and MySQL. Among the
speakers are core developers of the discussed Open Source projects, for instance
Ken Coar (Apache), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) or Kaj Arnö (MySQL).

PHP 5.0.0 Beta 1

[29-Jun-2003]
The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5
Beta 1. Both source packages, and a Windows build are available in the
Downloads Section. A list of changes
can be found in the ChangeLog.

Some of the more major changes include:

PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2. For a list of Zend Engine 2 changes, please visit
this webpage.

XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the
excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).

SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their
website.

Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket
operations on streams.

Note: This is a beta version. It should not be used in
production or even semi-production web sites. There are known bugs in it,
and in addition, some of the features may change (based on feedback). We
encourage you to download and play with it (and report
bugs if you find any!), but please do not replace your production
installations of PHP 4 at this time.

PHP Usage Survey

[24-Jun-2003]
Zend Technologies is sponsoring a public PHP Usage Survey.
The results will be shared with the PHP Group, and will help
us to better understand the ways in which PHP is being used,
and what may need improvement.
Fill it out
and get a chance to win one of 50 PHP T-shirts!

PHP 4.3.2 Released!

[29-May-2003]
The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of
PHP 4.3.2. This release contains a large number of bug fixes
and is a strongly recommended update for all users of PHP.
Full list of fixes can be found in the ChangeLog file.

Automatic Mirror Select

[23-May-2003]
In our ongoing battle to fight load and keep serving you content, whenever you
perform a search on www.php.net, you will be redirected onto a nearby mirror
(determined using the Directi
Ip-to-Country Database).
You may experience a few quirks in the search until your mirrors have synced an up-to-date
version of the site.

Country Detection

[04-May-2003]
We are proud to introduce you the latest addition to our My
PHP.net service. The PHP.net site and mirror sites now autodetect
your country using the Directi
Ip-to-Country Database. We use this information to present events in
your country in bold letters on the frontpage, and to offer close mirror
sites for downloads and your usual daily work.

My PHP.net

[24-Apr-2003]
The PHP website and mirrors sites now have a
'My PHP.net' page, which allows
you to check what language settings you have, and enables
you to set one which will override all the other detected
parameters.

However, normally this is not needed, as we remember the
language you used last time. Be sure to have cookies turned
on for PHP.net to let this feature work!

Grant Program

[06-Mar-2003]php|architect, is proud to
announce the creation of the php|architect Grant Program, whose goal is
to provide financial support to best-of-breed PHP-related projects.

Participation in the program is open to all open-source projects
that are related to PHP (but not necessarily written in PHP). The
program is accepting submissions now and will start distributing grants
in June of 2003.

Set your own language preference

[01-Mar-2003]
Starting from today, your browser's "Accept Language" setting is also
honored on language sensitive pages on the php.net site. If you would
like to get to the documentation page of echo for example, you can use
the /echo shortcut on all mirror sites, if your
browser is set to provide your language preference information to the
server. This also makes the PHP error message links point to the
documentation in your preferred language.

You can set your preferences under Edit/Preferences/Navigator/Languages
in Mozilla, and under Tools/Internet Options/Languages in Internet
Explorer. This will probably also enhance your web experience on sites
providing translated content.

First Hungarian PHP Conference

[25-Feb-2003]
The members of the Hungarian PHP community announce
the first Hungarian PHP Conference which
will take place in Budapest, on Saturday March 29th, sponsored by several
international and local companies. The conference offers an entirely free one
day activity with several presentations addressing basic and advanced topics,
as well, exclusively in Hungarian. Moreover, a five kilobyte-limited PHP
contest has been started to discover the most talented PHP programmers in
our country. The programme includes the first session of the so-called PHP
Division which will be established with the set purpose of representing the
community itself and promoting their interests in any national business and
official phorums.

PHP 4.3.1 released in response to CGI vulnerability

[17-Feb-2003]
The PHP Group today announced the details of a serious
CGI vulnerability in PHP version 4.3.0. A
security update, PHP 4.3.1, fixes the issue.
Everyone running affected version of PHP (as CGI) are encouraged to upgrade
immediately. The new 4.3.1 release does not include any other changes,
so upgrading from 4.3.0 is safe and painless.

PHPCon East 2003 - (April 23-25, 2003)

[01-Feb-2003]
PHPCon announces PHPCon East 2003 in New York City. This conference
features two days of technical learning with speakers such as
Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski, Michael Radwin, George Schlossnagle and
Jeremy Zawodny. PHPCon East also adds a third, full day of tutorials
offering practical, cogent PHP solutions and ideas including: MySQL
and PHP; Building and Consuming Web Services with SOAP; Getting
Started with PHP; High Performance PHP: Profiling and Benchmarking;
and more!

PHPCon East has discounts for early registration, students, non-profits,
and Tutorial/Conference packages. Early Bird Deadline is March 31st. For
more program information, visit
the PHPCon website.

Conférence PHP Québec 2003 - (Montréal, March 20&21rst, 2003)

[28-Jan-2003]
The PHP Québec association announces the Conférence PHP Québec 2003.
The conference will take place in the École Polytechnique de Montréal,
Québec, Canada.

The Conférence PHP Québec features two days of conferences, with
outstanding customer cases from Canada, and cutting edge technical
sessions, hosted by international experts. An exhibitor room will
showroom professional solutions.

[13-Jan-2003]
Software & Support Verlag announced the International PHP Conference 2003 - Spring
Edition - in Amsterdam. The dates for this event for PHP enthusiasts from
all over the world will be May 8 and 9, 2003. The conference venue is the RAI
conference center in Amsterdam.

Like the International PHP Conferences in Frankfurt this conference will
offer a first class program to an international audience of PHP enthusiasts.
We are happy to ask you to submit your proposals
for the session program.

PEAR Out of Beta!

[11-Jan-2003]
The PEAR development team is proud to announce that
PEAR is finally out of its long
beta period. As of PHP 4.3, the PEAR installer is installed by default.
Unix support is considered stable, while Windows and Darwin are still
of beta-quality.